Medicine is not just a career, but a calling
I have always felt keenly the suffering of animals. Since I was a child, I had wanted to be a vet. My parents persuaded me to abandon that idea by using the example of a vet whose university education was funded by the Public Service Commission. When he returned to Singapore , he was posted to serve his bond at the abattoirs. That was enough to persuade me to select my second career choice – a doctor. I have never regretted that decision.
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A long wait to thank you
I was a naïve 1st year medical officer still at the infantile phase of my career. It was 18 years ago in a District Hospital in Sabah. Prior to that, I had just completed the last 3 months of my internship in Paediatrics at Penang Hospital. On reporting for work, I still remember the Hospital Director telling me, “Since you have just completed your internship training in paediatrics, please take care of the paediatric wards”.
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My Kelantan ‘Connection’
I am writing this article as a series of anecdotes, sometimes disjointed, as I rack my ageing memory to recall incidents that took place some fifty years ago.
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Alan Alda Hawkeye
Ever since it was announced that a non-doctor, in fact an actor, had been invited to give the commencement address at one of the most prestigious medical schools in the country...
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The Velluvial Matrix
Many of you have worked for four solid years—or five, or six, or nine—and we are here to declare that, as of today, you officially know enough stuff to be called a graduate of the Stanford School of Medicine. You are Doctors of Medicine, Doctors of Philosophy, Masters of Science. It’s been certified.
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WHO Director-General’s letter to BMJ editors
In the editorial accompanying the feature on conflicts of interest at WHO, the author notes that it is “almost certainly true” that the mildness of the H1N1 pandemic, compared with the severity long expected from a virus like H5N1, has contributed to the current critical scrutiny of WHO’s decisions. As the editorial further states, this reality does not make it wrong to ask hard questions.
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